Wedded
They leave their love-lorn haunts,
Their sigh-warm floating Eden;
And they are mute at once,
Mortals by God unheeden,
By their past kisses chidden.
But they have kist and known
Clear things we dim by guesses-
Spirit to spirit grown:
Heaven, born in hand-caresses.
Love, fall from sheltering tresses.
And they are dumb and strange:
Bared trees bowed from each other.
Their last green interchange
What lost dreams shall discover?
Dead, strayed, to love-strange lover.
poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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Killed In Action
Your ' Youth ' has fallen from its shelf,
And you have fallen, you yourself.
They knocked a soldier on the head,
I mourn the poet who fell dead.
And yet I think it was by chance,
By oversight you died in France.
You were so poor an outward man,
So small against your spirit's span,
That Nature, being tired awhile,
Saw but your outward human pile;
And Nature, who would never let
A sun with light still in it set,
Before you even reached your sky,
In inadvertence let you die.
poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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A Mood
You are so light and gay,
So slight, sweet maid-
Your limbs like leaves in play,
Or beams that grasses braid :
O ! Joys whose jewels pray
My breast to be inlaid.
Frail fairy of the streets ;
Strong, dainty lure;
For all men's eyes the sweets
Whose lack makes hearts so poor ;
While your heart loveless beats.
Light, laughing, and impure.
O ! Fragrant waft of flesh,
Float through me so-
My limbs are in your mesh,
My blood forgets to flow ;
Ah ! Lilied meadows fresh,
It knows where it would go.
poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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Tess
The free fair life that has never been mine, the glory that might have been,
If I were what you seem to be and what I may not be !
I know I walk upon the earth, but a dreadful wall between
My spirit and your spirit lies, your joy and my misery.
The angels that lie watching us, the little human play,
What deem they of the laughter and the tears that flow apart ?
When a word of man is a woman's doom do they turn and wonder and say,
'Ah ! Why has God made love so great that love must burst her heart ?'
poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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Dawn
O tender first cold flush of rose,
O budded dawn, wake dreamily ;
Your dim lips as your lids unclose
Murmur your own sad threnody.
0 as the soft and frail lights break
Upon your eyelids, and your eyes
Wider and wider grow and wake,
The old pale glory dies.
And then, as sleep lies down to sleep
And all her dreams lie somewhere dead,
The iron shepherd leads his sheep
To pastures parched whose green is shed.
Still, 0 frail dawn, still in your hair
And your cold eyes and sad sweet lips,
The ghosts of all the dreams are them,
To fade like passing ships.
poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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The Immortals
I killed them, but they would not die.
Yea! all the day and all the night
For them I could not rest or sleep,
Nor guard from them nor hide in flight.
Then in my agony I turned
And made my hands red in their gore.
In vain - for faster than I slew
They rose more cruel than before.
I killed and killed with slaughter mad;
I killed till all my strength was gone.
And still they rose to torture me,
For Devils only die in fun.
I used to think the Devil hid
In women’s smiles and wine’s carouse.
I called him Satan, Balzebub.
But now I call him, dirty louse.
poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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Returning, We Hear the Larks
Sombre the night is.
And though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lies there.
Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
This poison-blasted track opens on our camp -
On a little safe sleep.
But hark! joy - joy - strange joy.
Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks.
Music showering our upturned list’ning faces.
Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song -
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand
By dangerous tides,
Like a girl’s dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides.
poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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The Destruction Of Jerusalem By The Babylonian Hordes
They left their Babylon bare
Of all its tall men,
Of all its proud horses ;
They made for Lebanon.
And shadowy sowers went
Before their spears to sow
The fruit whose taste is ash,
For Judah's soul to know.
They who bowed to the Bull god,
Whose wings roofed Babylon,
In endless hosts darkened
The bright-heavened Lebanon.
They washed their grime in pools
Where laughing girls forgot
The wiles they used for Solomon.
Sweet laughter, remembered not !
[...] Read more
poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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At Night
Crazed shadows, from no golden body
That I can see, embrace me warm ;
All is purple and closed
Round by night's arm.
A brilliance wings from dark-lit voices,
Wild lost voices of shadows white
See the long houses lean
To the weird flight.
Star amorous things that wake at sleep-time
(Because the sun spreads wide like a tree
With no good fruit for them)
Thrill secrecy.
Pale horses ride before the morning,
The secret roots of the sun to tread,
With hoofs shod with venom
And ageless dread;
[...] Read more
poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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My Days
My days are but the tombs of buried hours ;
Which tombs are hidden in the piled years ;
But from the mounds there spring up many flowers,
Whose beauty well repays their cost of tears.
Time, like a sexton, pileth mould on mould,
Minutes on minutes till the tombs are high ;
But from the dust there fall some grains of gold,
And the dead corpse leaves what will never die-
It may be but a thought, the nursling seed
Of many thoughts, of many a high desire ;
Some little act that stirs a noble deed,
Like breath rekindling a smouldering fire :
They only live who have not lived in vain,
For in their works their life returns again.
poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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